At the beginning of 1209 Innocent III had threatened the immediate excommunication of John, but the king had known how to keep him, and the bishops who represented him in the negotiations, occupied with one proposition of compromise after another until almost the close of the year. The summer was employed in settling affairs with Scotland, which down to this time had not been put into form satisfactory to either king. A meeting at the end of April led to no result, but in August, after armies of the two countries had faced each other on the borders, a treaty was agreed upon. William the Lion was not then in a condition to insist strongly on his own terms, and the treaty was much in favour of John. The king of Scotland promised to pay 15,000 marks, and gave over two of his daughters to John to be given in marriage by him. In a later treaty John was granted the same right with respect to Alexander, the heir of Scotland, arrangements that look very much like a recognition of the king of England as the overlord of Scotland. In Wales also quarrels among the native chieftains enabled John to increase his influence in the still unconquered districts. In November the long-deferred excommunication fell upon the unrepentant king, but it could not be published in England. There were no bishops left in the country who were acting in the interests of the pope, and John took care that there should be no means of making any proclamation of the sentence in his kingdom. The excommunication was formally published in France, and news of it passed over to England, but no attention was paid to it there. For the individual, excommunication was a more dreaded penalty than the interdict. The interdict might compel a king to yield by the public fear and indignation which it would create, but an excommunication cut him off as a man completely from the Church and all its mercies, cast him out of the community of Christians, and involved in the same awful fate all who continued to support him, or, indeed, to associate with him in any way. Even more than the interdict, the excommunication reveals the terrible strength of the king. When the time came for holding the Christmas court of 1209, the fact that it had been pronounced was generally known, but it made no difference in the attendance. All the barons are said to have been present and to have associated with the king as usual, though there must have been many of them who trembled at the audacity of the act, and who would have withdrawn entirely from him if they had dared. On his return from the north John had demanded and obtained a renewal of homage from all the free tenants of the country. The men of Wales had even been compelled to go to Woodstock to render it. It is quite possible that this demand had been made in view of the excommunication that was coming; the homage must certainly have been rendered by many who knew that the sentence was hanging over the king's head.
The year 1210 is marked by an expedition of John with an army to Ireland. Not only were William de Braóse and his wife to be punished, but the Lacies had been for some time altogether too independent, and the conduct of William Marshal was not satisfactory. The undertaking occasioned the first instance of direct taxation since the lands of the Church had been taken in hand, a scutage, which in this case at least would have a warrant in strict feudal law. The clergy also were compelled to pay a special and heavy tax, and the Jews throughout the kingdom—perhaps an act of piety on the part of the king to atone somewhat for his treatment of the Church—were arrested and thrown into prison and forced to part with large sums of money. It was on this occasion that the often-quoted incident occurred of the Jew of Bristol who endured all ordinary tortures to save his money, or that in his charge, until the king ordered a tooth to be drawn each day so long as he remained obstinate. As the eighth was about to be pulled, "tardily perceiving," as the chronicler remarks, "what was useful," he gave up and promised the 10,000 marks demanded.
John landed in Ireland about June 20, and traversed with his army all that part of the country which was occupied by Anglo-Norman settlers without finding any serious opposition. William Marshal entertained his host for two days with all loyalty. The Lacies and William de Braóse's family fled before him from one place to another and finally escaped out of the island to Scotland. Carrickfergus, in which Hugh de Lacy had thought to stand a siege, resisted for a few days, and then surrendered. At Dublin the native kings of various districts, said by Roger of Wendover to have been more than twenty in number, including the successor of Roderick, king of Connaught, who had inherited a greatly reduced power, came in and did homage and swore fealty to John. At the same time, we are told, the king introduced into the island the laws and administrative system of England, and appointed sheriffs.[72] John's march through the island and the measures of government which he adopted have been thought to mark an advance in the subjection of Ireland to English rule, and to form one of the few permanent contributions to English history devised by the king. On his departure Bishop John de Grey was left as justiciar, and toward the end of August John landed in England to go on with the work of exacting money from the clergy and the Jews that he had begun before he left the country.
The two years which followed John's return from Ireland, from August, 1210 to August 1212, form the period of his highest power. No attempt at resistance to his will anywhere disturbed the peace of England. Llewelyn, Prince of north Wales, husband of John's natural daughter Joanna, involved in border warfare with the Earl of Chester, was not willing to yield to the authority of the king, but two expeditions against him in 1211 forced him to make complete submission. A contemporary annalist remarks with truth that none of John's predecessors exercised so great an authority over Scotland, Wales, or Ireland as he, and we may add that none exercised a greater over England. The kingdom was almost in a state of blockade, and not only was unauthorized entrance into the country forbidden, but departure from it as well, except as the king desired. During these two years John's relations with the Church troubled him but little. Negotiations were kept up as before, but they led to nothing. On his return from the Welsh campaign the king met representatives of the pope at Northampton, one of whom was the Roman subdeacon Pandulf, whom John met later in a different mood. We have no entirely trustworthy account of the interview, but it was found impossible to agree upon the terms of any treaty which would bring the conflict to an end. The pope demanded a promise of complete obedience from John on all the questions that had caused the trouble, and restoration to the clergy of all their confiscated revenues, and to one or both of these demands the king refused to yield. Now it is that we begin to hear of threats of further sentences to be issued by the pope against John, or actually issued, releasing his subjects from their allegiance and declaring the king incapable of ruling, but if any step of that kind was taken, it had for the present no effect. The Christmas feast was kept as usual at Windsor, and in Lent of the next year John knighted young Alexander of Scotland, whose father had sent him to London to be married as his liege lord might please, though "without disparagement."
In the spring of 1212 John seems to have felt himself strong enough to take up seriously a plan for the recovery of the lands which he had lost in France. The idea he had had in mind for some years was the formation of a great coalition against Philip Augustus by combining various enemies of his or of the pope's. In May the Count of Boulogne, who was in trouble with the king of France, came to London and did homage to John. Otto IV, the Guelfic emperor and John's nephew, was now in as desperate conflict with the papacy as if he were a Ghibelline, and Innocent was supporting against him the young Hohenstaufen Frederick, son of Henry VI and Constance of Sicily. Otto therefore was ready to promise help to any one from whom he could hope for aid in return, or to take part in any enterprise from which a change of the general situation might be expected. Ferdinand of Portugal, just become Count of Flanders by marriage with Jeanne, the heiress of the crusading Count Baldwin, the emperor Baldwin of the new Latin empire, had at the moment of his accession been made the victim of Philip Augustus's ceaseless policy of absorbing the great fiefs in the crown, and had lost the two cities of Aire and St. Omer. He was ready to listen to John's solicitations, and after some hesitation and delay joined the alliance, as did also most of the princes on the north-east between France and Germany. John laboured long and hard with much skill and final success, at a combination which would isolate the king of France and make it possible to attack him with overwhelming force at once from the north and the south. With a view, in all probability, to calling out the largest military force possible in the event of a war with France, John at this time ordered a new survey to be taken of the service due from the various fiefs in England. The inquest was made by juries of the hundreds, after a method very similar to that lately employed in the carucage of 1198, and earlier in the Domesday survey by William the Conqueror, though it was under the direction of the sheriffs, not of special commissioners. The interesting returns to this inquiry have been preserved to us only in part.[73] If John hoped to be able to attack his enemy abroad in the course of the year 1212, he was disappointed in the end. His combination of allies he was not able to complete. A new revolt of the Welsh occupied his attention towards the end of the summer and led him to hang twenty-eight boys, hostages whom they had given him the year before. Worst of all, evidence now began to flow in to the king from various quarters of a serious disaffection among the barons of the kingdom and of a growing spirit of rebellion, even, it was said, of an intention to deprive him of the crown. We are told that on the eve of his expedition against the Welsh a warning came to him from the king of Scotland that he was surrounded by treason, and another from his daughter in Wales to the same effect. Whatever the source of his information, John was evidently convinced—very likely he needed but little to convince him—of a danger which he must have been always suspecting. At any rate he did not venture to trust himself to his army in the field, but sent home the levies and carefully guarded himself for a time. Then he called for new declarations of loyalty and for hostages from the barons; and two of them, Eustace de Vescy and Robert Fitz Walter, fled from the country, the king outlawing them and seizing their property. About the same time a good deal of public interest was excited by a hermit of Yorkshire, Peter of Pontefract, who was thought able to foretell the future, and who declared that John would not be king on next Ascension day, the anniversary of his coronation. It was probably John's knowledge of the disposition of the barons, and possibly the hope of extorting some information from him, that led him, rather unwisely, to order the arrest of the hermit, and to question him as to the way in which he should lose the crown. Peter could only tell him that the event was sure, and that if it did not occur, the king might do with him what he pleased. John took him at his word, held him in prison, and hanged him when the day had safely passed.
By that 23d of May, however, a great change had taken place in the formal standing of John among the sovereigns of the world, a change which many believed fulfilled the prediction of Peter, and one which affected the history of England for many generations. As the year 1212 drew to its close, John was not merely learning his own weakness in England, but he was forced by the course of events abroad to recognize the terrible strength of the papacy and the small chance that even a strong king could have of winning a victory over it.[74] His nephew Otto IV had been obliged to retire, almost defeated, before the enthusiasm which the young Frederick of Hohenstaufen had aroused in his adventurous expedition to recover the crown of Germany. Raymond of Toulouse, John's brother-in-law, had been overwhelmed and almost despoiled of his possessions in an attempt to protect his subjects in their right to believe what seemed to them the truth. For the moment the vigorous action which John had taken after the warnings received on the eve of the Welsh campaign had put an end to the disposition to revolt, and had left him again all powerful. He had even been able to extort from the clergy formal letters stating that the sums he had forced them to pay were voluntarily granted him. But he had been made to understand on how weak a foundation his power rested. He must have known that Philip Augustus had for some time been considering the possibility of an invasion of England, whether invited by the barons to undertake it or not, and he could hardly fail to dread the results to himself of such a step after the lesson he had learned in Normandy of the consequences of treason. The situation at home and abroad forced upon him the conclusion that he must soon come to terms with the papacy, and in November he sent representatives to Rome to signify that he would agree to the proposals he had rejected when made by Pandulf early in the previous year.[75] Even in this case John may be suspected, as so often before, of making a proposition which he did not intend to carry out, or at least of trying to gain time, for it was found that the embassy could not make a formally binding agreement; and it is clear that Innocent III, while ready to go on with the negotiations and hoping to carry them to success, was now convinced that he must bring to bear on John the only kind of pressure to which he would yield.
There is reason to believe that after his reconciliation with the king of England Innocent III had all the letters in which he had threatened John with the severest penalties collected so far as possible and destroyed.[76] It is uncertain, however, whether before the end of 1212 he had gone so far as to depose the king and to absolve his subjects from their allegiance, though this is asserted by English chroniclers. But there is no good ground to doubt that in January, 1213, he took this step, and authorized the king of France to invade England and deprive John of his kingdom. Philip needed no urging. He collected a numerous fleet, we are told, of 1500 vessels, and a large army. In the first week of April he held a great council at Soissons, and the enterprise was determined on by the barons and bishops of France. At the same council arrangements were made to define the legal relations to France of the kingdom to be conquered, The king of England was to be Philip's son, Louis, who could advance some show of right through his wife, John's niece, Blanche of Castile but during his father's lifetime he was to make no pretension to any part of France, a provision which would leave the duchy of Aquitaine in Philip's hands, as Normandy was. Louis was to require an oath of his new subjects that they would undertake nothing against France, and he was to leave to his father the disposal of the person of John and of his private possessions. Of the relationship between the two countries when Louis should succeed to the crown of France, nothing was said. Preparations were so far advanced that it was expected that the army would embark before the end of May.
In the meantime John was taking measures for a vigorous defence. Orders were sent out for all ships capable of carrying at least six horses to assemble at Portsmouth by the middle of Lent. The feudal levies and all men able to bear arms were called out for April 21. The summons was obeyed by such numbers that they could not be fed, and all but the best armed were sent home, while the main force was collected on Barham Down, between Canterbury and Dover, with outposts at the threatened ports. John has been thought by some to have had a special interest in the development of the fleet; at any rate he knew how to employ here the defensive manoeuvre which has been more than once of avail to England, and he sent out a naval force to capture and destroy the enemy's ships in the mouth of the Seine and at Fécamp, and to take and burn the town of Dieppe. It was his plan also to defend the country with the fleet rather than with the army, and to attack and destroy the hostile armament on its way across the channel. To contemporaries the preparations seemed entirely sufficient to defend the country, not merely against France, but against any enemy whatever, provided only the hearts of all had been devoted to the king.
While preparations were being made in France for an invasion of England under the commission of the pope, Innocent was going on with the effort to bring John to his terms by negotiation. The messengers whom the king had sent to Rome returned bringing no modification of the papal demands. At the same time Pandulf, the pope's representative, empowered to make a formal agreement, came on as far as Calais and sent over two Templars to England to obtain permission for an interview with John, while he held back the French fleet to learn the result. The answer of John to Pandulf's messengers would be his answer to the pope and also his defiance of Philip. There can be no doubt what his answer would have been if he had had entire confidence in his army, nor what it would have been if Philip's fleet had not been ready. He yielded only because there was no other way out of the situation into which he had brought himself, and he made his submission complete enough to insure his escape. He sent for Pandulf, and on May 13 met him at Dover and accepted his terms. Four of his chief barons, as the pope required, the Earl of Salisbury, the Count of Boulogne, and the Earls Warenne and Ferrers, swore on the king's soul that he would keep the agreement, and John issued letters patent formally declaring what he had promised. Stephen Langton was to be accepted as Archbishop of Canterbury, and all the exiled bishops, monks, and laymen were to be reinstated, and full compensation made them for their financial losses. Two days later John went very much further than this: at the house of the Templars near Dover in the presence of the barons he surrendered the kingdom to the pope, confirming the act by a charter witnessed by two bishops and eleven barons, and received it back to be held as a fief, doing homage to Pandulf as the representative of the pope, and promising for himself and his heirs the annual payment of 700 marks for England and 300 for Ireland in lieu of feudal service.
Whether this extraordinary act was demanded by Innocent or suggested by John, the evidence does not permit us to say. The balance of probabilities, however, inclines strongly to the opinion that it was a voluntary act of the king's. There is nothing in the papal documents to indicate any such demand, and it is hardly possible that the pope could have believed that he could carry the matter so far. On the other hand, John was able to see clearly that nothing else would save him. He had every reason to be sure that no ordinary reconciliation with the papacy would check the invasion of Philip or prevent the treason of the barons. If England were made a possession of the pope, the whole situation would take on a different aspect. Not only would all Europe think Innocent justified in adopting the most extreme measures for the defence of his vassal, but also the most peculiar circumstances only would justify Philip in going on with his attack, and without him disaffection at home was powerless. We should be particularly careful not to judge this act of John's by the sentiment of a later time. There was nothing that seemed degrading to that age about becoming a vassal. Every member of the aristocracy of Europe and almost every king was a vassal. A man passed from the classes that were looked down upon, the peasantry and the bourgeoisie, into the nobility by becoming a vassal. The English kings had been vassals since feudalism had existed in England, though not for the kingdom, and only a few years before Richard had made even that a fief of the empire. There is no evidence that John's right to take this step was questioned by any one, or that there was any general condemnation of it at that time. One writer a few years later says that the act seemed to many "ignominious," but he records in the same sentence his own judgment that John was "very prudently providing for himself and his by the deed."[77] Even in the rebellion against John that closed his reign no objection was made to the relationship with the papacy, nor was the king's right to act as he did denied, though his action was alleged by his enemies to be illegal because it did not have the consent of the barons. John's charter of concession, however, expressly affirms this consent, and the barons on one occasion seem to have confirmed the assertion.[78]